Righteous Wrath

Cuban journalists, who in the past have stoutly upheld the beauty of Cuban women, the virility of Cuban men and the fame of Havana as a city of tradition and culture as well as of rum and rumbas, manned their typewriters again last week. This time the assault was on film: the sequence in Guys and Dolls that shows Gambler Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) and friends living it up with Havana bawds and bravos in a lowdown nightspot.

Wrote Ulises Carbo, columnist for Prensa Libra: "The picture Guys and Dolls pictures Havana as a mecca for vice. It even goes to the extreme of presenting an honest missionary (Jean Simmons) who, influenced by what she sees here, gets drunk and passes out on a strange potion from a coconut shell in the midst of an atmosphere of scandal and prostitution." Luis Conte Aguero, Diario Nacional columnist, harking back to an earlier assault on Havana's morals, put it differently: "There is a lot of truth in the story, but there are also a lot of false statements, and what is definitely false, and what is irritating, is the intention to picture us as a degraded people . . . The general impression is offensive to our country."

None of the columnists denied that Havana has plenty of unrestrained gaiety. And it is well known that the government believes in reasonable toleration of vice rather than puritanical suppression, which might bring more unemployment, a fall in tourist trade and a drop in the hard-working policeman's extracurricular income. But, as Conte Aguero summed it up: "Some tourists look for beautiful vistas and historic sites, while others seek brothels and adventure anywhere they go. These last-named bury themselves in bawdyhouses, which exist here as elsewhere, and think that all Havana is the same as the tiny den to which their desire for a spree led them."

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